One Hundred
by DeviantWriter2015
Summary: One shot. The commander of the African base reflects on the death of who could've been the most important soldier in the war. Partly based on my own experiences playing OpenXCOM on Veteran difficulty with Ironman savings (so you can't constantly reload saves).


"I'm sorry." Adisa Waldemar said.

Looking at the casualty list of XCOM soldiers, it was all he could say.

Dear God he needed a drink.

He was the commander of the African XCOM base "Swamp Palace." One would think being a base commander of a paramilitary organization would have perks...and one would be mostly wrong. His bunk was as small as the rooms of the living quarters.

He didn't get better food or drink, though he was able to make personnel requests for beer. Adisa didn't particularly like beer, but he preferred it to spirits, which he also preferred to wine.

The case of Dragon's Milk sitting beside his feet was looking good however. And getting handsomer by the minute.

The Psionic Laboratory had been installed barely two days ago, that was great and everything. But the tests would not begin until the start of next month—July. Commander Adisa had complained, at length, about the stupidity of waiting until July to start tests; and the head scientist Petra Odessa had simply favored him with a sympathetic smile.

"It's for the best." she'd said, and again favored him with that sympathetic, patronizing smile.

Yeah, for the best. While the body count of the troops kept piling up and that arrogant white woman researched motion scanners with a range too short to be used out in the open.

Let's look at the list of dead recruits, shall we?

Sofie, Davy, Kamaru, Masaharu, Yordanka. Desta, Kamba, Jung, Harkonen, Sofie. Norberg, Aleksander, Warania (who'd been an excellent heavy weapons expert, at least until he blew himself up by accident with a misplaced heavy cannon HE-round) Felica, and Roberts and Johns. The list when on and on and on.

Kille Gren had been the first to die. He had a psychic strength of 60. Not too damn shabby.

Most of the casualties would not have been Psions even had they survived. Desta and Davy Buta, for instance, had scores of zero. That dippy twit Odessa said that it wouldn't be like a psionic black hole, where the aliens could only control the Zero and all the others would be blocked (like some people on the internet theorized). All it meant was that your head was basically no different than an open door. The only way traffic would miss going in or out, was if they weren't pointed at the door in the first place.

Of the casualties, several had psychic strength scores in the 90+ range, which effectively made them Psions in the commander's eyes regardless of them not being trained yet. Looking at every single one of them made Adisa Waldemar cringe. He didn't want any of his soldiers to die, but that was beyond the realm of reasonable expectations.

It used to be that a medium scout would end up with a third of the troops dying. Now, with powered armor, casualties still occurred of course, but much less so. A squad of fourteen troops raided a Muton base last month, and twelve walked out unharmed.

The only dead had been a rookie and a scout by the name of Alla. Alla had been wounded for a month...and died on her first mission back. And she hadn't even killed the Muton she was gunning for. The rookie's name was Alli, and he'd managed two kills before dying himself.

Raiding Sectoid bases was still the stuff of damn nightmares. Cyberdiscs plasma cannons could certainly punch through Power Suits without too much trouble; though Heavy Lasers could one-shot the Discs and so could tanks equipped with laser cannons.

Laser weapons could one-shot Sectoids without any real problem. They also weren't especially effective against Power Suits, so alien-controlled soldiers were less of a threat. That didn't change the fact that half the squad was crippled during the raid of the first alien base. Ten soldiers and one laser tank had gone in. At the end of it all, only four soldiers had come out.

One of them was Harkonen. James Harkonen.

With a firing accuracy below 60, Harkonen of course had been designated as a "scout."

Scouts were generally (not always) armed with one handed weapons. For a great deal of the Alien War, Harkonen had been assigned a laser pistol. The accuracy was rubbish, but the rate of fire was fast enough that it would've made more sense to call it a submachine gun. But whatever.

Along with pistols, scouts were generally armed with grenades. The regular human grenades were simply too weak to kill anything but Sectoids with a direct hit. But high explosives, that was an altogether different story. Soldiers with high enough strength ratings could use the HE packs like heavy grenades...which was what they were when it came right down to it.

They were mostly phased out by alien grenades. Key word being "mostly." Being light as hell, alien grenades allowed each soldier to have a powerful indirect explosive, but they weren't as strong as HE packs.

Scouts were also armed with stun rods, which they would put into their open hand when they ran out of grenades.

As a scout, Harkonen was usually one of the first troops off the Skyranger—if not _the_ first troop.

He was the first one to spot enemy alien, allowing the snipers in back (with Heavy Lasers) to pick them off.

He was the one rounding corners to risk reaction fire from aliens lying in wait for ambushes (which had become less of an issue once soldiers had trained themselves on how to strafe).

He was the one in charge with stunning high ranking aliens. During the raid on the first Sectoid base, fatefully it was Harkonen himself who stunned a Sectoid leader on the way to the base's command hub.

Then, almost humorously, a Sectoid had come running out of the main hub itself. Not knowing what it was, Harkonnen stunned it on a whim.

It had turned out to be a Sectoid Commander.

Harkonen, meanwhile remained a squaddie. A squaddie who'd survived 12 missions and had six kills under his belt. Many of the captains didn't have that many kills. Even the infantry commander, Mahmoud El-Amin, didn't have that many. It wasn't the highest number of kills. That honor went to Captain Krysty and Colonel Brennan who each had fifteen kills.

Harkonen owed his very good kill count, not to accuracy, but because of his higher than average speed. He got right up in the enemies face and shot them repeatedly with pistols.

He survived the Muton base and went into the third base. The third base, again, was Sectoids. Again, it had been raided by ten soldiers and one laser cannon-tank. And _again_ only four soldiers had survived.

Unfortunately, Harkonen was not one of them.

Much like before he'd been the one to storm the command center, where the Sectoid commander was. He stormed it with Rookie Kamaru. Only this time, both soldiers missed their shots. They had been wounded earlier by an alien grenade thrown by a mind-controlled friendly.

They healed one another up as much as they could. Most of the rest of the squad was spread throughout the alien base, either bleeding out on the cold metal floors or in the grip of panic attacks. The tank was destroyed.

They headed up the elevator. The Sectoid commander was to their left. Kamaru fired and scorched a piece of the ground between them. Harkonen fired and the laser shot struck just to the left of one of the red hologlobes. Had the bolt hit, it might've started a long chain reaction of mini-explosions. The Sectoid, with moderate armor, would not have survived. With power suits, Kamaru and Harkonen probably would have.

But it didn't hit.

The commander fired back, more from reflex than accuracy. It didn't matter. He killed Kamaru first...and then Harkonen. The plasma hole through their bodies was large enough to fit a football through. Vertically.

Eventually, Squaddie Olivier attacked the command center. He was completely by himself. The closest person was Krysty, who was bugging out in the organic dirt hallway that led to the command center. Olivier killed the commander. His laser rifle popped its head like a zit, which had given Olivier a _great_ deal of satisfaction.

At once, the bullshit psychic attacks were over. The remaining four soldiers slowly got their morale back and eliminated the remaining two Sectoids and two Cyberdiscs without incident.

The Psi-Lab was completely built and fully functional fifteen hours later.

Adisa Waldemar, stared at the results. In particular he was looking at the psionic strength score of Harkonen. It had to be seen to be believed. Scratch that: Adisa was seeing it and he _still_ wasn't believing it. It was the highest of any XCOM soldier currently in the project, and likely would remain the highest in recorded human history.

Harkonen had a score of...

Of...

"Damn it." Commander Adisa Waldemar said. He pushed his chair away from the desk. Then pulled it back in. The beer was sitting at the desk.

"I've failed you all. I'm so sorry. I'm so damn sorry."

 _No it's not your fault._

But he was the commander of the whole XCOM project...and he knew it was.

He took one of the bottles of cream stout out from the six-pack resting besides his feet. He opened it and hesitated, suddenly fearful, but then his mind turned to Harkonen. Adisa began to drink.

"I'm sorry." He mumbled between gulps. Looking at the list of casualties...it was all he could say.


End file.
